Nathan Goodman
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nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Nathan Goodman
@nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
2.4K followers 4.2K following 300 posts
Economist who studies institutions, political economy, polycentricity, defense & peace economics, and border militarization.
https://www.nathanpgoodman.com/
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1Ue5NBMAAAAJ&hl=en
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nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
In his book "Nobody is Protected," @reecejones.bsky.social documents how the Border Patrol became a dangerous national police force.

His findings are more relevant now than ever.
Nobody is Protected How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States Reece Jones
October 29, 2025 at 4:41 AM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I don't anticipate the terminology I use in the chapter to catch on.

But I hope the core insights do.

Because emancipation matters, and mainline political economy can help us understand current oppression & what proposals for overcoming it are feasible.
7. Conclusion Regardless of whether the terms I use in the previous section ever catch on within social movements (they likely will not), I hope that this chapter encourages researchers to continue exploring the synergies between mainline economics and radical LGBT politics. Analytical anarchism, as well as the related research program of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom regarding polycentric governance, can be quite fruitful for understanding social movements, mutual aid, and anarchist prefigurative politics. Public choice, particularly the analysis of political capitalism, can be fruitfully applied to understand the systems of state violence and economic privilege that radicals rightly critique. Ultimately, mainline economics offers a powerful lens for understanding our world. Through that understanding, radicals can better understand the feasible paths available for emancipatory social change. Sometimes this means casting cold water on proposed paths towards emancipation. Attempts to remake the world through centralized economic planning will lead not to emancipation, but to calculational chaos and abuses by the wielders of centralized power. Some nominally democratic or decentralized forms of radical social change may be subject to similar pitfalls. Yet the most radical and anti-authoritarian elements of the movement, namely the anarchists and abolitionists, are prefiguring a better world each day. Rather than attempting to impose liberation from the top-down, they are forging new forms of associational life that enable marginalized people to survive, thrive, and govern themselves in the face of hostile power. The insights of mainline economics can help us understand what sets these distinct radical paths towards liberation apart from one another, as well as why imperfect but promising moves towards emancipation have occurred within liberal democracies. The partial liberalism we see around us enables experimentation, entrepreneurship, coordination, and community. Radical critics offer trenchant critiques of violence and inequity in existing institutions. Yet for a radical change to be truly emancipatory, it should preserve and expand this space for experimentation and entrepreneurship, not constrain or crush it.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I am under no illusion that anarchists, leftists, or radical queer & trans activists will adopt my "radical liberal" language.

But fortunately, they largely embrace bottom-up, experimental, polycentric strategies consistent with the core point I'm making.
Many radical queer and trans movements emphasize direct action and mutual aid projects that leverage local knowledge to directly help the most vulnerable, rather than imposing top-down plans via efforts to seize control of a state that is hostile to queer and trans survival. These strategies are far less vulnerable to the pitfalls we identified in the previous section. Rather than imposing centralized economic planning, they empower individuals to use their local knowledge, cooperate from the bottom-up, and help their community. In this respect, the vibrant and positive sum practical anarchism of radical queer and trans liberation movements is already consistent with the radical liberal vision I outline here. They might never choose to speak of it in those terms, as they may associate “liberalism” with a stodgy status quo rather than an emancipatory project. But they already live their lives in a manner that is consistent with bottom-up discovery, endogenous rule formation, the pursuit of the positive sum, and efforts to live our lives as dignified equals. Ultimately, that is more important than labels. While social anarchists and other LGBTQ radicals may at times envision future arrangements that would likely have harmful unintended consequences, the day-to-day activities of their movements help to create productive and emancipatory forms of voluntary association. The anarchist emphasis on experimentation, direct action, and mutual aid leads to genuinely positive action, regardless of what totalizing visions any given radical may be motivated by.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Even if the liberals' concerns about feasibility are addressed, the radicals may fear that having markets & property at all entails dangerous inequality.

I argue that abolishing state secured privileges & entry barriers helps alleviate this concern.
But even if a radical liberal anarchism of the sort that the 19th century individualists embraced seems possible, some radical queer and trans activists may worry that it winds up supporting existing unjust distributions of wealth and life chances. Yet consistent with Holcombe’s analysis of political capitalism, the 19th century individualist anarchists recognized that existing inequality and economic injustice rests upon state-granted monopoly privileges, especially “four of principal importance: the money monopoly, the land monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly” (Tucker 1893). Tucker argued that ending such state granted monopoly privileges would empower ordinary people and erode precisely the exploitative and unequal relations that socialists wished to resist. Members of queer radical movements have likewise sought to end unjust state-secured monopolies. For instance, activists affiliated with AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) have opposed pharmaceutical patents and FDA restrictions that limit HIV patients’ access to medicine (Szijarto 2023). Radical transgender activists have often supported routing around the monopoly privileges that medical professionals have when it comes to prescribing gender affirming hormones and related treatments (Rotondi et al. 2013). These activists engage in mutual aid, routing around state-erected barriers to entry and ensuring that their fellows have access to the healthcare they need. This strategy directly challenges state secured monopoly privileges and moves us in the direction of a genuinely free market, rather than the captured political capitalist system we live under.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I also argue that the prefigurative social experimentation carried out within anarchist, abolitionist, and radical queer & trans social movements gives us further reasons for hope.
The radical queer and trans movement’s emphasis on prison and police abolition, as well as their efforts to organize individuals who face violence and criminalization by the state, means that they have direct experience engaging in this type of endogenous and bottom-up governance. To the extent that the most marginalized members of the queer and trans community see the police and the criminal justice system as a threat rather than a service provider, they will seek out alternative mechanisms to keep their communities safe. For instance, the Audre Lorde Project, an organization run by LGBT people of color, has operated a safe neighborhood campaign that works to deescalate and prevent hate violence without calling the police (Goh 2019). Similar projects in which marginalized people build alternatives to state administered governance have been documented by Mariame Kaba and other prison abolitionists through a project called “One Million Experiments.” This name resonates with the emphasis mainline economists place on bottom-up processes of experimentation and discovery, rather than top-down one-size-fits-all solutions.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I argue that the economic literature that Peter Boettke has called "analytical anarchism" gives us good reasons to think that individualist anarchism is feasible.
However, some liberals may balk at the proposal. They may question its feasibility. After all, Mises, Hayek, and other similar liberal thinkers did not embrace Tucker’s anarchist conclusions. This is largely because they believed that a state equipped to enforce general rules, especially rules pertaining to the protection of property and contract, was necessary for sustaining the market order and the social cooperation it begets. Were they correct? Tucker and de Cleyre did not think so. More importantly, an emerging research program in mainline economics provides social scientific reasons to believe that social order, social cooperation, and the protection of rights are possible without a centralized state. This research program, which Peter Boettke (2005) has dubbed “analytical anarchism,” uses historical case studies, institutional analysis, and economic theory to analyze situations of endogenous rule formation. These situations occur when individuals or groups cannot rely upon a state’s formal legal system to protect their rights or solve their governance dilemmas, and therefore they instead endogenously devise governance arrangements that work for them. Boettke and Candela (2020) summarize a large portion of this literature, showing that both inclusive mechanisms that bring people together and exclusive mechanisms based around selective groups can be used to provide governance that sustains social cooperation from the bottom-up.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Anyway, just because economics places constraints on the kinds of alternative arrangements that are feasible doesn't mean we can't seek radical forms of alternative governance.
Yet while mainline economics hereby imposes a set of constraints upon the ways we can escape the current morass of imperialism, coercively imposed gender conformity, political capitalist exploitation, and mass imprisonment, this does not mean that a radical break from the existing order is impossible. Instead, it means that this radical break, to achieve liberatory ends, must maintain opportunities for bottom-up, decentralized coordination of individuals’ diverse plans. In the next section, I discuss one possible way forward for this kind of bottom-up radicalism.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
This has significant implications for understanding which types of radical social change are feasible.

Its implications are most obvious for state socialists, but it has implications for social anarchist proposals too.
Whether social anarchist proposals are subject to this critique is a more complicated question. After all, social anarchists are not proposing a central planning board to coordinate production and distribution. Their preferred arrangements are still polycentric, and therefore leave room for individuals and groups to act on their local, context-specific knowledge. However, to whatever extent social anarchism entails jettisoning exchangeable rights to productive property, it is likely to prevent the emergence of prices for productive property. The knowledge discovered and communicated through prices is therefore unlikely to be discovered and communicated. In such a context, local decisions can still proceed based on local knowledge, but coordination and cooperation across wider groups of people that cannot directly communicate with one another is likely to be hampered. When the extent of social cooperation, productive specialization, exchange, and coordination is limited in this way, people will likely be substantially poorer. Under such conditions of poverty, fewer people, including queer and trans people, will be able to flourish and thrive. The productive specialization that has given rise to LGBTQ-empowering forms of commerce and civil society would be hampered. Moreover, to achieve coordination in the absence of markets and central planning, communities would likely turn to tradition as an alternative coordination mechanism (Lavoie 1985b). Traditions are often a useful coordinating mechanism, but they can be stultifying and oppressive for those whose values, goals, and identities do not fit well with them. We might therefore expect coordination based on tradition to further the marginalization of at least some queer and trans people. Thus, any proposal that aims to entirely jettison exchangeable property rights to productive property is likely to exacerbate oppression, not emancipate queer and trans people.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
A core insight in the mainline literature is that without exchangeable property rights over productive goods, economic calculation is impossible.

Property enables exchange, which enables us to discover prices. These prices communicate knowledge & enable coordination.
Resources, including resources used for production, are scarce. They have competing uses. Therefore, using them for one productive project entails foregoing the benefits of another productive project. Given the multiplicity of possible projects we could pursue, and the variety of production techniques people could choose to use for those projects, they need some way to decide how to allocate scarce resources among competing ends. Moreover, these productive goods are heterogeneous. Therefore, while a piece of productive property can be used for multiple different kinds of projects, it cannot be easily shifted to producing just any other good. Mining equipment used to extract metal from the ground cannot be easily repurposed into farm equipment. This means that if scarce resources are used for productive projects that turn out to be unwanted, there are real costs to shifting production plans. Decisions about which production plans to pursue therefore have real costs, costs that would be concealed by treating capital as homogeneous, as some neoclassical economists do. Given the opportunity cost of pursuing one production project over another, how are people to choose among the diverse range of possible projects? How are they to assess which have benefits that exceed the costs? This is the problem of economic calculation. In a market economy with institutions of private property rights, individuals and firms purchase, rent, own, and sell productive property. The exchanges they make give rise to exchange ratios, or prices, of these productive goods. These prices act as knowledge surrogates, communicating easily digestible information about how much value others in the market attach to alternative uses of the goods. Profit and loss feedback helps the owners of firms discern whether consumers value their products more or less than alternative uses of the inputs that they have used. That feedback also creates an incentive to adjust one’s productive plans if they are not creating value. Of course, markets are imperfect, characterized by externalities, information asymmetries, and distortions wrought by the political capitalist system we live in. However, even disequilibrium prices act as important knowledge surrogates, and as a lure for alert entrepreneurs to promote adjustments away from disequilibrium. . Moreover, the presence of political capitalism does not give us reasons to jettison price feedback altogether, but instead reasons to resist the state-secured system of privilege that distorts markets in the interests of politically connected capitalist rent seekers. Unfortunately, the socialist program of central planning does jettison price feedback, at least for the goods used within production processes. Even so-called “market socialists” propose abolishing property rights in the means of production, instead replacing them with a mix of central planning and trial and error. Markets, in this system, are reserved for consumption and labor decisions. By eliminating the institutional foundation that exchange of productive property rests upon, socialist planning prevents exchange ratios (or prices) from emerging for these productive goods. This means giving up the guides that help individuals coordinate their plans with one another and pursue projects that create value for others. When the process of market coordination via price feedback is abandoned, socialists need some alternative mechanism to coordinate productive plans. They often opt for central planning, which centralizes power in the hands of an elite group who then face all the problems of discretionary coercive power that radicals rightly recognize in the American police, prison wardens, and military commanders. The results include shortages, gluts, and other resource misallocations that impoverish the population. Moreover, the economy becomes militarized and regimented (Lavoie 1985b). In some cases, the economy, while nominally subject to central planning, decentralizes de facto decision-making into the hands of politically connected individuals who control plants and resources. In this way, socialism devolves into a system of mercantilism or political capitalism (Anderson and Boettke 1997). The inability to engage in economic calculation means that a system that attempts to abolish private property or institute central economic planning is unable to raise productive forces, coordinate plans, and thereby guide society towards a world of plenty in which people can flourish free from exploitation, class antagonism, and alienation. That world is not within the realm of possibility. Therefore, while central planning is possible, it is not possible for it to achieve the lofty and admirable goals of socialists. This applies to all forms of socialism that attempt to replace coordination via the market process with coordination via central planning, not just those that explicitly embrace a dictatorship of the proletariat. As Lavoie (1985b) explains, the knowledge problem impacts not just comprehensive planning, which attempts to plan the entire economy, but also various forms of noncomprehensive planning, such as industrial policy. Indeed, Lavoie devotes an entire chapter to discussing various proposals for planning via "economic democracy."
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Yet at the same time, mainline economics enables us to assess the feasibility & likely consequences of proposed radical alternatives.
5. Economics as a Constraint on Utopias If radical institutional changes are needed to challenge militarism, policing, and repressive gender roles, what form should these changes take? What strategy and aims should we pursue in our efforts to build a better world? Mainline economics is vital to answering this question because economic reasoning helps us analyze what institutional arrangements are feasible and what their likely consequences are.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
With coauthors like Chris Coyne and Abby Hall, I use mainline economics to critically analyze state violence, including war, policing, & border militarization.

This analysis has significant complementarity with the queer radical critique.
This helps explain the organization of state violence in our society. Executives and lobbyists for defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing face low transaction costs when it comes to making deals with public officials. Often they are former public officials themselves, as a revolving door operates between the Pentagon, congress, and politically connected businesses and lobbying firms. This further lowers the transaction costs associated with making political exchanges. Those who benefit from militarized policies reap concentrated benefits from these policies, which gives them strong incentives to invest time and resources advocating for militarism. By contrast, many of the costs of militarism are widely dispersed throughout society, which reduces the incentive for ordinary people to invest time and energy in anti-militarist activities. As for those most directly impacted by militarism, they face incredibly steep costs when it comes to influencing U.S. policies. Many of them reside abroad, and even those who live in the U.S. are often poor, marginalized, and living a precarious life wherein they have relatively few resources to spend on efforts to influence national politics. These dynamics give rise to an entrenched military-industrial complex that rarely faces strong, well-organized political opposition (Coyne and Goodman 2022a; Goodman 2024a). Members of marginalized minority groups are especially vulnerable to the violence enabled by police militarization. One reason for this is that their voice in the political arena is more limited. They have fewer resources to use to try to influence politics, and they are less likely to have connections to the politically powerful, which means that they face higher transaction costs associated with political exchange. In addition to being limited in their ability to exercise voice in politics, they are also more constrained in their ability to exit jurisdictions with violent police departments and move somewhere less oppressive. If you do not have savings or good employment opportunities, the costs of moving to a new jurisdiction can simply be prohibitively high. Their limited access to both voice and exit renders marginalized people especially vulnerable to state violence by militarized police (Coyne and Hall-Blanco 2016). A similar process occurs in the U.S. borderlands, as weaponry, skills, and tactics developed for U.S. wars abroad come home and are used by the Border Patrol (Coyne and Goodman 2022b). The militarization of the U.S. Border Patrol has included the development of a powerful SWAT team known as the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), the development of a large fleet of drones that surveils the borderlands, and extensive contracts between the Border Patrol and major defense contracting firms. This militarization undermines privacy and civil liberties in the borderlands, pushes migrants into dangerous desert routes that lead them to premature deaths, and results in tight-knit crony relationships between defense contractors, the Department of Homeland Security, and Congress (Coyne and Goodman 2020). It also fuels the militarization of policing and expansion of surveillance in the domestic interior, as BORTAC agents and CBP drones assist police throughout the United States (Goodman 2024b).
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
To argue for this admittedly unorthodox position, I draw on an analytical tradition in political economy that my colleagues @vstorr.bsky.social, Stefanie Haeffele, and Peter Boettke call "mainline economics."
To make the case for a radical liberal approach to LGBTQ emancipation, I draw on a political economy tradition known as “mainline economics,” Mainline economics applies rational choice theory, which focuses on the purposeful actions of individuals. However, mainline economists emphasize that individuals always act within an institutional context. This includes not just formal legal institutions, but also informal institutions such as social norms. Using institutional analysis, mainline economists analyze how individual purposive action under alternative institutional arrangements can give rise to different patterns of social cooperation, including social cooperation and coordination that arises from the bottom-up without central command. This social scientific approach allows us to examine how existing liberal institutions have enabled some expansion of LGBTQ freedom, while also enabling us to analyze analyze the institutional incentives and feedback mechanisms that underly the oppressive systems queer radicals seek to resist. Moreover, it gives us a framework for analyzing the likely implications of alternative institutional arrangements that have not yet been observed. We can use this to offer a plausible account of how a radical liberal variety of left-wing market anarchism could enable social cooperation, human flourishing, and LGBTQ emancipation. The orange cover of the book "Mainline Economics: Six Nobel Lectures in the Tradition of Adam Smith."
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I argue that insights from abolitionist queer radicals should be synthesized with liberal ideas.

The result is a "radical liberal" individualist anarchism of the sort advocated by some of my @c4ssdotorg.bsky.social friends like @corymassimino.bsky.social & @jasonleebyas.bsky.social
Throughout this literature, the word “liberal” largely takes on a pejorative tone. Liberalism is seen as something to resist, an embodiment of the system we live under as well as reform movements that merely seek inclusion within that system. However, I will argue that liberalism and radical queer and trans politics can be complementary. While radical queer and trans scholars and activists see themselves as challenging liberalism, I contend that many of their arguments can fruitfully inform a radical liberal politics that seeks to abolish prisons, borders, police, militarism, and the state itself. This radical liberal variety of anarchism is part of the left-wing market anarchist tradition, which traces its roots to 19th century thinkers who called their ideas by various names, including liberalism, individualist anarchism, and mutualism (see Chartier and Johnson 2011). The version of radical liberalism that I support is a kind of individualist anarchism, in the tradition of 19th century individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Lysander Spooner (see Long 2020). These anarchists advocated a society built on voluntary association, in which the state-granted monopoly privileges associated with political capitalism were levelled and any valuable services currently provided by the state were instead provided by voluntary associations. Many of these individualist anarchists said explicitly that their views were a more radical and consistent variation upon classical liberal ideas of their time. For instance, Benjamin Tucker described his views as “consistent Manchesterism,” in reference to Manchester’s classical liberal free-traders (Tucker 1888), and elsewhere called himself an “unterrified Jeffersonian democrat” (Tucker 1893). Voltairine de Cleyre connected anarchism with American liberal notions of individual liberty. Tucker beautifully expounded on the bottom-up, positive sum social cooperation that is at the heart of a liberal vision of spontaneous order and cooperation without command: "“The history of humanity has been largely one long and gradual discovery of the fact that the individual is the gainer by society exactly in proportion as society is free, and of the law that the condition of a permanent and harmonious society is the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with equality of liberty. The average man of each new generation has said to himself more clearly and consciously than his predecessor: My neighbor is not my enemy, but my friend, and I am his, if we would but mutually recognize the fact. We help each other to a better, fuller, happier living; and this service might be greatly increased if we would cease to restrict, hamper, and oppress each other. Why can we not agree to let each live his own life, neither of us transgressing the limit that separates our individualitie…
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
@deanspade.bsky.social's work fits into a broader literature that advocates abolitionist & revolutionary, rather than reformist, approaches to queer & trans emancipation.

Within this literature, the term "liberal" tends to take on a pejorative tone.
Spade’s work is part of a broader literature that contests mainstream liberal approaches to LGBTQ politics, instead advocating a more revolutionary approach to queer and trans liberation (Conrad 2014; Daring, Rogue, Shannon, and Volcano 2012; Stanley and Smith 2015). These scholars argue that liberal reforms promote inclusion within systems that remain fundamentally violent, oppressive, and unequal. Rather than seeking inclusion within these systems, they advocate challenging these systems. For example, they argue that rather than focusing on ensuring that LGBTQ soldiers can openly serve in the military, efforts should instead be aimed at ending imperialist wars. Rather than seeking to establish and enforce hate crime statutes that impose mandatory minimum sentences for those who target victims based on sexual orientation or gender identity, they argue that such statutes further strengthen oppressive systems of policing and mass incarceration. They want these systems abolished. The purple and black cover of the book "Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex." The rainbow cover of the book "Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion" edited by Ryan Conrad. The cover of the book "Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire," which features a phot of what appears to be pink tear gas at a protest.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
But is formal legal equality enough?

Radical scholars like
@deanspade.bsky.social
make a compelling case that it isn't.

Even if the law says good things, it may enable significant oppression in practice.
Yet not all LGBTQ scholars and activists are so sanguine about liberal legal orders. For instance, Dean Spade (2015) argues that excessive focus on formal legal equality can leave behind the most vulnerable and marginalized members of the LGBTQ community. Even if the laws on paper appear to respect LGBTQ rights, the most vulnerable members of LGBTQ communities may still be vulnerable to police violence, incarceration, deportation, and other legally sanctioned oppression. Even if this violence arises from laws that do not appear to violate formal constitutional guarantees of equal protection or privacy, this state violence is still clearly oppressive. A strategy that focuses merely on what the law says about LGBTQ people, rather than on a more thorough examination of power, the distribution of wealth and opportunities, and state violence, is likely to leave the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ community behind. The cover of Dean Spade's book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law."
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
My chapter is titled "A Radical Liberal Approach to LGBTQ Emancipation."

I begin by noting the ways that liberal legal institutions have codified & protected formal rights for LGBTQ people.
Abstract Progress towards freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people can largely be attributed to experimentation and entrepreneurship within markets and civil society. Liberal institutions of property, contract, consent, and free association enable this experimentation. However, some LGBTQ scholars and activists critique liberalism, arguing that rhetoric of legal rights and equality masks exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. They argue that liberal approaches to LGBTQ rights prioritize what formal legal rules say over realities on the ground. They are not entirely wrong. Formal rules can be written in a way that appears general, while simultaneously enabling state violence, cronyism, and restrictions on opportunity. These tend to harm the most vulnerable in society. Emancipation therefore requires more than a mere focus on what formal rules say. However, I argue that mainline economics offers the best explanation of the pervasive institutional dysfunctions that LGBTQ critics of liberalism wish to resist. Mainline economics also shows that attempting to address these issues by abolishing or restricting private property rights will cause serious dysfunctions. Therefore, I argue that the solution to the concerns of LGBTQ critics of liberalism is radical liberalism. Radical liberalism preserves and expands the freedom to experiment that has enabled substantial emancipation already. It also offers a way to overcome systemic issues that harm the most marginalized. 1. Introduction In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the United States Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not prohibit same-sex marriages, as such prohibitions violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Other rulings had similarly applied liberal legal principles to protect the civil liberties of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) people. For instance, Lawrence v. Texas (2003) ruled that sodomy laws violated the right to privacy. Such laws had largely been used to criminalize consensual sex among gay and bisexual men. These types of rulings suggest the emancipatory potential of a liberal legal system, in which federal courts constrain the power of state and local governments, preventing them from violating the civil liberties of minority groups.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
My colleague Mikayla Novak has a new edited volume out called "Liberal Emancipation."

She has brought together a great group of scholars, including @erwindekker.bsky.social, @ottolehto.bsky.social, and even me, to analyze the emancipatory aspects of liberalism!

Read on to learn what I argue... 🧵
The cover of the book "Liberal Emancipation: Explorations in Political and Social Economy." It features a lot of pink as well as a photo with a stairway and a sunny blue sky with some white clouds.
October 3, 2025 at 4:21 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
On the latest episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, I spoke with @mclem.org about the economics of immigration!
t.co/jtOEt8B7Oq

Learn how current immigration policies leave "trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk," mass deportation means less jobs for Americans, and much more.
A blue image of young F.A. Hayek in a suit in front of some icons representing scholarship, ideas, and podcasts. Text in an orange square says "EP. 218: Michael Clemens on the Trillion-Dollar Question of Immigration."
September 17, 2025 at 3:39 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Reading @kenyonz.bsky.social on the First Red Scare and the Anarchist Exclusion Act and it feels depressingly relevant. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
However, it took several decades for American law to render foreign-born anarchists into permanently deportable anticitizens. Only after President William McKinley's assassination at the hands of an (American-born) anarchist did Congress take action and pass the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903. This new law barred the entry of foreign-born anarchists and authorised their deportation within 3 years of their arrival. Within the context of the First World War and Red Scare, this legislation was radically expanded to allow for the post-entry deportation of the “anarchistic classes,” defined as all aliens who were (or became) anarchists, or who advocated, were affiliated with an organisation that advocated, or distributed literature advocating “opposition to all organized government,” the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States, the killing of public officials, the “unlawful damage, injury, or destruction of property,” or “sabotage” (Hutchinson, 1981, pp. 423–425). For the first time in American immigration law, no statute of limitations was included. With the stroke of a pen, all foreign-born anarchists, as well as numerous other varieties of radicals, became permanently “illegal”and deportable, and the citizenship of all immigrants became, as a result, “conditional” and contingent upon abstention from certain forms of political speech and affiliation (Kraut, 2020; Weil, 2012). The right to entertain anarchist views without risk of deportation effectively became a jus soli right that applied only to natural-born citizens (although, as discussed below, even they might face incarceration under statewide bans on “criminal anarchy” and“criminal syndicalism”). As Goldman and Berkman warned at the time, “Henceforth the naturalized citizen may be disenfranchised, on one pretext or another, and deported because of his or her social views and opinions”(Berkman & Goldman, 1919, p. 21). The path was now open for the American state to exercise its sovereignty by removing anarchists from its territory. Beginning in 1917, the Department of Justice and Department of Labor began formulating an ambitious plan to expel all radical aliens from the United States. “They saw it,” according to historian John Higham (1955, p. 221), “as a means of purifying American society.” Although the results fell far short their hopes, officials nevertheless succeeded in deporting 979 immigrants under antianarchist statutes between 1919 and 1925, and an unknown number of additional radicals under other provisions of immigration law. In the fiscal years 1920 and 1921, the 760 members of the“anarchistic classes” expelled accounted for more than 10% of all deportees removed from the United States (Zimmer, 2018, p. 133). Although mass arrests swept up radicals of all sorts, the groups most likely to find themselves deported were members of the anarcho-syndicalist Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (URW), the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and Italian anarchist circles. 4 | F A CE T O F A CE WI T H T H E E N E M YFederal authorities detained over 10,000 suspected foreign-born radicals in 1919 and 1920 alone (United States Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, 1921, p. 26). Every detainee was subjected to at least one, and often multiple, examinations conducted by local immigration inspectors, sometimes supplemented by preliminary interrogations at the hands of police or Department of Justice agents. These encounters literally brought anarchists and agents of the state faccia a faccia col nemico [face to face with the enemy], to borrow the title of deportee Luigi Galleani's collection of insurrectionary writings (Mentana, 1914). The resulting transcripts reveal four main strategies employed by detainees, each of which engaged with discourses of national belonging and citizenship in different ways.
September 16, 2025 at 2:31 AM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
In Public Choice, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Murtazashvili, Ali Palida and I analyze the role that both centralization and decentralization have played in Ukraine's defense strategy.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Public choice and national defense: lessons for the Russian–Ukrainian war Nathan P. Goodman1 · Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili2 · Ilia Murtazashvili2 · Ali Palida2 Received: 1 May 2024 / Accepted: 29 July 2025 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025 Abstract This paper applies public choice theories of national defense to analyze key features of the Russian–Ukrainian war. A key aspect of Ukraine’s political reforms since 2014 has been strengthening the autonomy of local governments. Reforms to Ukraine’s defense system included both aspects of centralization—through the rapid assimilation of private defense organizations in 2014–15 and again in 2021–22—and decentralization, particularly through the creation of local military administrations after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. The autonomy-enhancing local governance initiatives likely improved Ukraine’s crisis response capacity, while decentralizing aspects of the defense system appear to have bolstered territorial resilience. At the same time, decentralizing defense creates pressure on the autonomy of local governments and the centralizing aspects of defense sector reform raise concerns about declining individual rights and liberties. More broadly, the Russian– Ukrainian war illustrates how public choice theory can illuminate the complex institutional arrangements—both centralized and decentralized—that underpin the coproduction of national defense as a multifaceted public good. Keywords Defense economics · Polycentricity · Decentralization · Ukraine · Russian– Ukrainian war
August 29, 2025 at 7:31 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
@zacharywoodman.bsky.social also makes this point well in his latest @c4ssdotorg.bsky.social piece replying to @mattzwolinski.bsky.social c4ss.org/content/60672
Before we delve into the empirical case, it is worth pointing out that the left libertarian belief in and advocacy of such institutional rearrangements is far thicker than merely an empirical prediction. It is also that, but perhaps more fundamentally, they are normative commitments. In truth, there are many institutional forms that a stateless free market society could conceivably take place depending on the preferences, beliefs of the individuals within that market society, and technological status of such a society: from objectionably hierarchical technofeudalist dystopias, to highly localist economies with socialist tendencies, to the sort of cosmopolitan, broadly liberal and libertarian society. This is not to say any form of market order is equally likely to obtain in the absence of the state, given social scientific facts and human psychological propensities as well as the path dependent nature of sociopolitical evolution. However, the nomological possibilities of what a stateless market order could look like are quite varied and broad. What we insist is not simply that a freed market would magically lead to an egalitarian utopia, but that we are the market, and by the very act of morally advocating for and attempting to actively build less hierarchical economic and social arrangements, we are helping to bring such arrangements about. Unlike critics like Zwolinski, we do not take the existing preferences of the mean or modal market actor under capitalism as a mere given, but view it as something which itself can be shaped and reformed in the marketplace of ideas.
August 26, 2025 at 12:02 AM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
I epitomize "the GMU side of C4SS." I've softened some of these predictions in response to critique. E.g., added these passages to better incorporate some pushback I received on an earlier draft. cosmosandtaxis.org/wp-content/u...
While I focus on movements that I believe expand freedom for those previously marginalized, my argument does not imply that market processes only enable movements that expand freedom. Markets create an incentive to cater to unmet demands, which means offering products and services, including social spaces, to those whose demands for such products and services are unmet. These incentives guide entrepreneurs to serve all prospective consumers, not just those I support or approve of. Because gender is subjectively and intersubjectively important as an institution, and because there are heterogeneous beliefs about which gen-der roles are desirable, there will likely always be those who contest prevailing gender norms. Sometimes they will contest these norms because they restrain the freedom of marginalized people. But in other in-stances, they may contest these norms because they create space for autonomous actions that disrupt prior meanings and points of orientation associated with other gender expectations. Therefore, while market processes create social spaces and opportunities for social entrepreneurs associated with movements for feminism and LGBT rights, they also create opportunities for social entrepreneurs who wish to strengthen or reinforce traditional or restrictive gender roles for a variety of reasons. In this case, the interaction of the market process with processes of political contestation does not create an inexorable arc of history that bends towards justice. Rather, it creates an open-ended process in which diverse individuals with heterogeneous values engage in political contestation with one another. Note that social movements advocating progressive or freedom-expanding changes to gender normsare not the only movements whose members use Twitter to advance their ends. For instance, Ahmed andPisoiu (2021) analyze how several far-right groups in Germany, such as the Alternative für Deutschland(Alternative for Germany), the Autonomous Nationalists (AN), and the Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (Identitarian Movement Germany—IBD) use Twitter to advance their ideas. All three of these far-rightgroups use Twitter to condemn feminists and the LGBT community. Where feminist and LGBT move-ments have sought autonomy and the erosion of old gendered restrictions, these far-right movements seekto restore rigid gender roles that would significantly constrain the autonomy of many people. The iterativeprocess of commercial and social entrepreneurship that I analyze in this paper will not be used for just oneset of political goals. Instead, it opens a wide arena of political contestation, creating a dynamic process inwhich current meanings and institutions regarding gender will be contested, for good and for ill.
August 25, 2025 at 11:59 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Now, I think you're right that it isn't going to be a framing that gets widely adopted or gets mass appeal.

I explicitly acknowledge this multiple places in a forthcoming book chapter on this stuff.
7. Conclusion Regardless of whether the terms I use in the previous section ever catch on within social movements (they likely will not), I hope that this chapter encourages researchers to continue exploring the synergies between mainline economics and radical LGBT politics. Analytical anarchism, as well as the related research program of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom regarding polycentric governance, can be quite fruitful for understanding social movements, mutual aid, and anarchist prefigurative politics. Public choice, particularly the analysis of political capitalism, can be fruitfully applied to understand the systems of state violence and economic privilege that radicals rightly critique. Ultimately, mainline economics offers a powerful lens for understanding our world. Through that understanding, radicals can better understand the feasible paths available for emancipatory social change. 6. Toward Radical Liberalism and Emancipation for All The notion of “radical liberalism” may strike many as laughable or incoherent. After all, the term “liberal” often evokes notions of milquetoast support for the existing system, of asking elites to implement reforms rather than pursuing fundamental institutional change (see Byas 2017; Lavoie 1977). Yet it was not always this way. After all, liberalism began as a radical movement for social change, creating a massive break from the old order, the ancien regime, the aristocracy, the power of throne and altar (Rothbard 1965; Lavoie 1985b). Moreover, as shown in section 4, the analytical tradition of mainline economics offers a scientific basis for analyzing fundamental institutional dysfunctions associated with militarism, borders, police, prisons, political capitalism, and other institutional arrangements that reformists often simply take for granted. In this sense, it can provide the basis for what Lavoie (1985b) calls a “scientific radicalism.” Social science in this liberal tradition shows us why fundamental changes to the underlying institutional incentives and feedback mechanisms, not mere tinkering around the edges, are required to end the pathologies we see around us. This scientific radicalism can take the form of a “radical
August 22, 2025 at 3:08 AM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
Often, words like "capitalism" and "socialism" take away more conceptual clarity than they add.

Vincent Ostrom explained this well: www.mercatus.org/research/res...
Vincent Ostrom: Probably the best way to characterize our approach would be to start with one of our most influential themes: the idea that broad concepts such as “markets” and “states” or “socialism” and “capitalism” do not take us very far in thinking about patterns of order in human society. For example, when some “market” economists speak of “capitalism,” they fail to distinguish between an open, competitive market economy and a state-dominated mercantile economy. In this, they follow Marx. He argued that “capitalism” has a competitive dynamic that leads to market domination by a few large monopoly or monopoly-like enterprises. But what Marx called “capitalism” Adam Smith called “mercantilism.” Similarly, many authors who write about “capitalism” fail to recognize the complexity of capitalist economic institutions. They overlook the rich structures of communal and public enterprises in societies with open and highly competitive market economies. Instead, we should expect to find some combination of market and non-market structures in every society, and we should recognize the complex configuration of institutions behind labels such as "capitalism." We might usefully think about combinations of private and public economies existing side by side. However, it's important to stress that not all forms of public enterprise are, or need to be, state-owned and operated. Various forms of communal or public ownership may exist apart from state ownership. Markets are diverse and complex entities. Markets for different types of goods and services may take on quite different characteristics. Some may work well under the most impersonal conditions. Others may depend upon personal considerations involving high levels of trust among trading partners. In other words, the options are much greater than we imagine, and we can see this is true if we don’t allow our minds to be trapped within narrowly constrained intellectual horizons.
August 21, 2025 at 4:26 PM
nathanpgoodman.bsky.social
We need people who will continue to advance the radical and emancipatory ideas of Don Lavoie.

His work showed the power of bottom-up discovery and the dangers of top-down power.
The cover of "National Economic Planning: What Is Left?" Don Lavoie’s Enduring Scholarly Legacy Guest Editor, Nathan Goodman Don Lavoie (1951–2001) made vital contributions to the modern research program in Austrian economics. His book Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered helped scholars better understand the history of the socialist calculation debate, as well as the substantive economic theory being discussed in that debate. Prior to Lavoie’s work, the dominant view among mainstream economists was that the Austrians had lost the debate. Lavoie showed why this view rested on an incorrect understanding of the market process, particularly a neglect of the role of rivalry in market competition. Several years before the fall of the Soviet Union, Lavoie was offering economists the intellectual tools that they needed to understand the failures of socialist planning. His book National Economic Planning: What Is Left? contributed further to our understanding of the socialist calculation debate. Lavoie contrasts three ways of promoting coordination in society: tradition, planning, and the market. He shows that systems of central planning are beset by two interrelated problems: the knowledge problem and the power problem. Furthermore, he shows that these are endemic not just to efforts at comprehensive planning, but also to the noncomprehensive planning carried out by governments around the world. Provocatively, he argues that, given these facts, the emancipatory ends of the radical left are best achieved by a radical free market approach.
August 7, 2025 at 6:00 PM